IPFS is a free distributed file system that has served for the past few months to test our end-to-end workflows, from writing the snapcraft.yaml to continuous delivery to the users. But it also has been an useful experiment for the new role of the Ubuntu community, now that the software will be delivered directly from upstream, with no maintainers and no launchpad in the middle. I wrote a little about this here:

Here at Ubuntu we are working hard on the future of free software distribution.
We want developers to release their software to any Linux distro in a way
that's safe, simple and flexible. You can read

The latest version of IPFS, v0.4.8, is now in the candidate channel. And it can use some testing, so when it’s moved to the stable channel and auto-updated on the machines of all the users, they get a polished and flawless experience.

For newcomers, this is a nice way to start learning about snaps and snapcraft, and about IPFS and distributed systems.

To get high-quality snaps, just like with debs, we need help from the community to run tests, make translations, write docs, fix bugs. It’s just the packaging where things are so easy now that once the simple yaml file is done, it’s not likely that we will have to look at it a second time. We now have many snaps in the store that would be happy to get more hands. If you want to help, let me know.

Travis CI offers a great continuous integration
service for the projects hosted on GitHub. With it, you can run tests, deliver
artifacts and deploy applications every time you push a commit, on pull r

So from now on, the calls for testing don’t need the manual execution of the smoke. Everybody contributing can just focus on trying to break the system doing exploratory. And if somebody wants to help automating more tests, that will be very appreciated. Let me know and I can help you getting started.

pura vida, and thanks to everybody who has helped. We recently reached 1000 unique installs